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Posts Tagged ‘Magma’

To finish off our series of predictions, I would like to point you to another series of interesting and informative prophesies. Click on the following topics to see these predictions collected by Brian Bailey, Editor of EDA DesignLine.

I believe that 2012 will be a challenging, but very interesting year. The pressure on the big EDA companies will definitely increase. Pressure coming from the shareholders, and from the users, who can play one against each other due to comparable offerings. From a technical point of view, the challenges keep rising at an even faster pace and less solutions are provided. I expect that the Synopsys/Magma merger will go through, which will take away an important piece of variety in the community. Consequently, this will increase the consideration of alternative solutions. This in return will help to improve or establish collaboration between EDA companies, leaders and smaller ones, and we might see teaming ups of some of the smaller ones to assemble packaged solutions to well-defined problems instead of proposing point tools. Despite this optimism, I expect that a lot of the smaller EDA tool providers will need to think out of the box in the future to survive.

One lingering question for 2012 is what will become of the Magma back-end platform? I predict that Synopsys will phase out the Magma Talus platform in favor of ICC. Why? It makes no sense for Synopsys to continue to field and support two different systems although it is likely that there will be some transfer of technology into ICC. Converting the existing Talus user base over to ICC is no small task and will likely take several years to complete as well as require incentives and utilities to move the existing base over to the Synopsys platform.

Timing verification is another story. Synopsys will capitalize on the acquisitions of Extreme and Magma to leverage the technologies in those products to develop and deliver the next generation PrimeTime platform. Once they complete this, they will have re-solidified their position as the industry golden standard in static timing verification.

It will be very interesting to see how the consumer-driven SoC market will evolve. SoCs used to be comprised of a processor, memory, various IP blocks, and the on-chip infrastructure needed to support them such as clock, power and communications channels. Now SoCs have multiple processors, large numbers of IP blocks, multiple on-chip communications channels and multiple memories. In essence, today’s SoCs are comprised of multiple SoCs as we used to define them.

The 2012 SoC will beget big challenges in design and even more so in verification. IP will become more important. And even though hardware performance and power will matter, system design and software will become the differentiating items.

SoC system design and verification will be especially active, because it is what the system does that really counts. (After all, the point of building an SoC is to deliver a winning end product.) To a great extent that will require a huge software and verification effort — under the schedule pressures that come from a hugely competitive consumer products market.

Continuing with my conversation with Tom Kozas, president of CADmazing Solutions, I asked him about a hypothetical scenario:

Ed: So Tom, what would happen if for some reason, the big three EDA vendors all went away? So instead of Cadence, Mentor, Synopsys, the biggest three would be Magma, Apache? Atrenta?

Tom: I think this raises even more questions.

Ed: Hmmm…interesting. What questions?

Tom: Several come to mind: Would this mean renewed growth for the industry? Would the fundamentals change that encourage investment in new startups? Would the design flows become more or less integrated, collaborative, and global?

Ed: Ok, good questions to ponder. So what would be THE big issue?

Tom: The “Silicon” in Silicon Valley is missing. Without investment in new semiconductor startups, growth simply won’t happen. Virtually all new design starts are happening within the big systems and semiconductor companies which means the only way to grow an EDA company, is to steal market share.

But would this translate to increased value for the remaining EDA companies in the eyes of the financial community? What’s interesting about this hypothetical is, even though it would put the remaining EDA companies in a position to take advantage of this opportunity they might not be able to.

Ed: Just to play devil’s advocate, why wouldn’t that next set of players, whoever they are, be able to take advantage of the sudden disappearance of the big three? And who do you consider to be that next set of players?

Tom: Good questions. But let me respond by saying what they will need to provide.

So, the next big three will have products that have great user interfaces, provide online collaboration, and be part of a new ecosystem that enables innovation. The industry already has advanced technology but needs graphical and command-line interfaces that exploit the online design environment.

Second, designers don’t necessarily sit in the same building but often have to work on the same problem. For example, two or more designers should be able to share the timing database and bring up the same timing path without having to rerun static timing analysis and do it within minutes no matter where they are in the world.

Finally, the current EDA ecosystem is in the dark ages, there needs to be a new model that facilitates new algorithm and tool development with a reward system.